This is very important. As an end-user, it is disappointing (though
somewhat
understandable from hardware vendors) to hear suggestions that users
should
write different code for different MPI implementations. For me, one of
the biggest
selling points of MPI over home-grown systems is its its potential for
transparent
use on heterogeneous clusters.
A lot of our programmers are scientists with a very limited knowledge
(or interest)
of message passing technology. What they want is a black box message
passing
package that will run on a variety of platforms.
I think it would be a selling point for a vendor MPI package if it was
offered like:
"This package is optimized for our systems, but it's also available for
...)"
For example, I could crank a CFD code on a high-end machine while
visualizing
it on my own workstation. I know of at least one company using PVM for
this kind of
thing to connect a Pentium PC to SGI boxes.
Pete Bradley
Pratt & Whitney